Illegitimacy, Inter-Generational Conflict and Legal Practice in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy‪.‬

Early Modern France was a society obsessed with the harmful effects of "disorder." The perception that women were subject to their passions more than men meant that the period saw the law used increasingly as a means of controlling women. Legal changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to place husbands more firmly in control of a couple's property, and even to exclude women from ruling as monarchs. (1) But perhaps none of the legal changes in this period has received as much attention from historians as those that attempted to regulate female sexuality. To a significant extent these changes revolved around the question of how to deal with illegitimate children and their mothers--the re-definition of infanticide and the corresponding spike in prosecutions, the criminalization of rapt (elopement), and the decline in the recherche de paternite. (2) While there is little doubt that elites were concerned about the problem of disorder, and that legal changes from 1500 to 1789 increasingly marginalized women and criminalized their sexuality, it is much more difficult to say if and how life may have changed for ordinary women. Indeed there is evidence that women during the Old Regime continued to control substantial amounts of property, that many daughters inherited as much as their brothers, and that women remained active in the labor market and market economy. (3) Economic necessity, a lack of political will within the judiciary, and the stubborn resilience of popular culture may have mitigated against the growing misogynistic tendencies of the law. In fact several historians have recently argued that attempts by social elites during the Early Modern period to impose discipline on ordinary men and women were largely ineffective. (4) The present article examines laws and practices surrounding illegitimacy in the eighteenth century. I show that, whatever the intentions of those writing the laws, ordinary women finding themselves pregnant outside marriage could use the courts and turn repressive laws to their own advantage.